LFR Droprates in 5.2

Ghostcrawler has been using Twitter instead of the forums for a while, and recently he's been addressing a lot of class balance issues, as well as talking about the PTR.

The biggest announcement he's recently made was that new gear in 5.2 won't have Item Upgrade options, such as Throne of Thunder raid gear. Instead, Item Upgrades may be options for patches that do not have new raid content.

Is Item Upgrade going to be available for 5.2 Gear (e.g. Tyrannical PVP and Throne of Thunder). Thoughts on how well it works?ATM, we are planning on no upgrading during 5.2. Too early to evaluate how well it worked. I'm sure it will need tweaking. I would think having higher ilevel would help a lot in the new content and will compete for a time with newer gear. still no answer if VP will be reset/downgraded like in the past on 5.2's release?I don't believe we have answered that yet. (View Source)

Hi. Is valor pts upgrade system implemented only for in-between tiers period or also for new tiers one like in 5.2. ? Thanks.Our plan at this mome

While many of us are still on vacation, Blizzard staff is returning to regular news posting! Today we have some explanations behind the Valor Points cap--always a hot topic--and what the purpose of common-quality vendor gear serves when it gives minimal upgrades. Personally, I think it adds some neat flavor even if the items aren't huge upgrades, but would like to be able to use them for transmog.

Ghostcrawler has also been pretty active on twitter dispensing advice and answering player concerns. We've picked out some of the most interesting recent ones, which cover class balance, LFR droprates, and cooking catch-up mechanisms.

The cap should not really be seen as punishment to people for being able to reach the maximum amount of Valor Pointss every week. The idea behind the cap is to give people a choice on how they reach the cap without having them feel obliged to do everything.

Update: A clarification regarding Stampede for Beast Mastery Hunters was added in after this blog was published:

Ghostcrawler

Class Balance Concerns -> BM Hunters

Update: We have just discovered a bug in which the debuff that makes Stampede pets weaker than normal pets was not being applied in Arenas. This helps explain why hunters could cause so much damage in Arenas but not in (say) the outdoor world or a dungeon environment.

<div class="detail"><p>Now that Mists of Pandaria has been out a few weeks, we wanted to let you all know what we consider working well in PvP, what we want to improve, and what’s coming down the pike. I’m going to split this up into three parts: a discussion of Matchmaking Rating (MMR), class balance concerns, and a sneak peek at some of our PvP plans.</p></br><p><u><span style="font-size:14px;"><strong>MMR</strong></span></u></p></br><p>As I’m sure you’re aware, the intent behind MMR is to match players by skill. This is accomplished by comparing an assigned number (MMR) that adjusts based on the relative MMR of t

Blizzard is following the trend of many gaming companies tonight by taking to Reddit to do their interaction with the community! Tonight Blizzard developers and community team members are going to be hosting a Q&A session through the popular website.

The Q&A is now done and we feel like this was a tremendous one. Blizzard really outdid themselves with transparency, talking extensively about issues they'd previously avoided. The PvE section is especially illuminating. Thanks Blizzard!

Today's a busy day for Blizzard! They're having a WoW Developer Reddit AMA at 5:30 PM PDT today, and they also just posted Patch 5.0.5 notes (mainly tooltip and bug fixes) and a preview of The Jade Forest, including screenshots and music samples!

<div class="post-detail"> It’s been two weeks since <a href="http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/7045643/504_Survival_Guide-8_24_2012" class="bml-link-url2">patch 5.0.4</a> was released and, with only two weeks to go until Mists of Pandaria takes the world by storm, we feel that this is the perfect time to give you access to the World of Warcraft development team. Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 11 beginning at 5:30 p.m. PDT, we’ll be conducting a live developer “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/wow/" class="bml-link-url2">/r/WoW</a>. I’ll be on-hand to host the chat and will have Lead Systems Designer Greg Street, Lead Quest Designer Dave Kosak, Lead Encounter Designer Ion Hazzikostas, and Game Director Tom Chilton available to field your questions. <br/><br/>We’ll spend at least an hour working to answer everything possible.